Odysseus returning home
by robot-ninja-wizard accountant
Summary: Usopp finds himself being drawn back to the idea of little Syrup Villiage, but settling back in can be an adventure all its own especially when he isn't the only one who has changed over the years. Ussop and Kaya aren't 17 anymore, but that doesn't mean you stop chasing your dreams. You just have to think harder about what your dreams really are.


Authors Note: I own neither One Piece or The Odyssey. I have taken liberties with the stories of both. This story surprised me with the directions it has gone. It isn't sexy, I think it is trying to be a mature "what is happiness" kind of story, because the One Piece world is build on dreams, but picking out dreams can be very difficult. What motivates, what happens to a One Piece character after they have achieved their dream? Advice would be appreciated. I still haven't figured out if there will be two or three chapters, this chapter is set up, and so I am not quite sure how quickly I want to get to the resolution. Either way the next one is mainly from Usopp's point of view. This isn't a love triangle story if my choice of cut off makes you worried. Well, that is my full caveat, please tell me if it would have been better with liberal uses of the delete button.

_._._._._.

Odysseus the brave warrior of Greece went off to sea and Penelope waited. As the years went on many told Penelope that Odysseus was dead, but her faith never wavered, and so when she could hold the suitor back no longer, she set a task for her hand in marriage that only Odysseus could pass.

_._._._._.

The rest of Syrup Village had never known Usopp the way that Kaya or the Usopp gang did. When Usopp went off to sea to become a brave warrior, Kaya completely believed that he would return home. She had already doubted him once, and she was not going to do it again. When she followed the adventures of Usopp and the Strawhats in the news, she watched as Usopp was slowly but surely achieving his dream of becoming that brave warrior of the sea. During the time, Kaya started studying medicine, facing her own fights, going through her own daily journeys with the knowledge that if Usopp could follow his dreams so could she. And as she grew up, Kaya seemed to start accumulating suitors. She was pretty, smart, very wealthy, and she didn't have any parents to discourage the young men from appear at her door. Kaya had her own goal and dreams, and so she was quite content to wait for Usopp and to have Merry show the other young men the door. In the village though, people began to grumble about how it wasn't right to such a young pretty girl to go waiting for a scamp like Ussop, who was surely dead by now.

As the Strawhats progressed further and further down the Grandline, it seemed that their journey got ever more perilous. If this worried Kaya, then she just studied her medicine all the more diligently so that no matter what shape Usopp returned in, he would be just fine. Then the news hit, the Strawhats had found Raftel, and the world was consumed in chaos. Out in little sleepy Syrup Village, Kaya didn't have the first clue what was going on. Eventually word came out that there had been a big war, and that now the Revolutionaries had taken control of the World Government. Out on peaceful East Blue that sound quite scary, but the transition to the new government seemed to bring only good things, and actually impacted Syrup Village very little. People became to settle into the new normal, but even as normalcy seemed to return, news of the Strawhats seemed hearsay at best. "I hear they all died in the war". "I hear their Captain is now one of the heads of government." "I hear that they are still on the Grandline acting as villainous as ever." It didn't help that the other villagers didn't really seem to care. They saw her belief that Ussop was alive and with the Stawhats as nothing more than a delusion.

Still Kaya waited. The suitors became more and more persistent. As there continued to be no reliable news about the Strawhats, even Merry suggested that maybe Kaya could take one of the young men out. After all it had been years since she saw Usopp, they would have both surely changed a great deal. Maybe like his father he had decided never to return here after all. And there is nothing wrong with dating someone else because she and Usopp were never a romantic couple to begin with. At this point, Kaya made a decision.

_._._._.

"Are you sure about this Miss Kaya? I do not think this is the wisest of paths?" Merry asked as he watched the young woman double-check the distances between the last ax and the one she was currently trying to bury into the ground.

"This is just the sort of challenge that would draw a brave warrior of the sea, and I have faith that Usopp could pass this test with his eyes closed. Besides it is not like I am promising to marry this person, if someone else wins then all I am promising is one date or a small cash prize that I can easily afford. And if Usopp is dead, well at least I will be meeting people with daring and adventure." Kaya replied as she put all her weight onto the shovel.

The test was simple if not easy. Kaya found twenty axes with just the narrowest of holes as part of an armory displace in her late father's study. The person had to shoot through the axes and hit the bulls-eye another thirty yard further from the last ax. To make sure that the person is shooting through the axes, paint balloons are placed in the hole through which the challenger would shoot through. This would make it so that she could tell if they don't actually shoot through the holes in the axes, and it would slow the velocity of the projectile making the task all the more difficult.

I might take some time, but she believed that the story would reach Usopp eventually.

_._._._.

Onion, Carrot, and Pepper were surprised when they say the axes actually standing behind the mansion on the hill. Kaya had talked about her plan, but they never expected her to go through with it. Now that it looked like it was really happening the three boys, or really young men, found themselves full of excitement.

"Usopp would have loved this."

"He always did think the town needed livening up"

"What if this attracts pirates?"

"If pirates come then we will just have to scare them off, for we are the Usopp pirates and this is OUR village.

_._._._._.

The first people to try where actually villages her mostly tried to see if they could throw small rocks hard enough to go through the first of the axes, they weren't really serious but it was a fun challenge to try. Merry had left posters in the towns of surrounding islands. Soon enough there were some travelers that decided to take of the challenge.

A number of Kaya's obnoxious suitors turned up, but thankfully none of them could pass the test.

The most popular weapon was a gun by far. But they did see a few archers, and one kid using a slingshot, who did not understand why Kaya started crying when he said that he decided to pick of the slingshot when he saw that the pirate king's sniper used one.

They had two winners. One was a quiet elderly male archer, who asked for the cash prize and left. The other was a woman with a wicked aim with a pistol, she asked for a date, which turned out to be a great deal of fun, although at the end Kaya had to tell the sharpshooter that she didn't have any interest in her, but that she hoped that at least they both had a good time and good luck for the future. She actually took this date more seriously and with more of open-mind then she thought she would when she set the condition. It also made Kaya realize how young and sheltered she was, meeting all these people had changed her. It made her wonder how much Usopp had changed. Kaya decided to take all her dates seriously, because if she was really now going to believe that Usopp was the one she wanted to wait for she needed to know that he really was the best for her. Kaya also came to a decision about what she was going to do with her medical training.

_._._._.

(thus ends part one)


End file.
